Donald Trump (R) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in February. Picture: AFP.

Two former heads of Mossad have urged Israel to withhold intelligence from the US after President Trump was accused of passed classified information to the Russians.

Danny Yatom, a former director of the spy agency, called the leak a “grave violation” and said that Israel should punish Washington for it. “We need to abstain from transferring information to [Trump], or to give him only partial information, so that he can’t endanger a source,” Mr Yatom, who led the agency from 1999 to 2001, said.

Shabtai Shavit, his predecessor, suggested that the new president was a danger to Israeli assets.

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Mr Trump is said to have passed highly sensitive information to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a meeting in the Oval Office on May 10. The information concerned an ISIS plot to smuggle bombs hidden in laptop computers on to aircraft. Israeli intelligence sources said that they learnt of the leak from sources inside the self-proclaimed caliphate, and alerted their counterparts at the CIA.

The official Israeli reaction has been muted but, in private, Israeli spies were furious about the disclosure. They were already wary of Mr Trump’s ties to Russia, which is fighting alongside Iran and Hezbollah in Syria. “And now we have confirmation,” one army officer said. “We don’t have any confidence that he’ll keep our secrets.”

Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist, reported yesterday that CIA officials told their Israeli counterparts to “be careful” what they shared in future.

The row threatens to cast a pall over Mr Trump’s visit to Israel on Monday, part of his first foreign tour as president. He will also visit Saudi Arabia, Belgium and the Vatican. In Riyadh he is expected to call for the creation of an “Arab NATO”; a regional military force to include Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states. The US would not be a member, though it might play a “co-ordinating” role.

Israel might also be quietly involved. It has no diplomatic relations with the Gulf states, but they have built discreet security ties over the past few years, united by their animosity towards Iran.

Mr Trump will meet Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, during his 36-hour visit.

Officials in Jerusalem initially cheered the election of a Republican president who ran on an aggressively pro-Israel platform, but Mr Trump has since disappointed his followers in the region, both with the erratic nature of his presidency and his about-face on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He has insisted that the traditional hour-long tour of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, be shortened to 15 minutes for him, while a planned speech at the fortress of Masada was abruptly dropped when American officials realised how hot the Negev desert would be in late May.

On a more substantive level, Mr Trump has reneged on an oft-repeated campaign pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Most foreign countries view the city as disputed territory and keep their missions in Tel Aviv, an hour to the north.

The White House rebuffed Mr Netanyahu’s request to accompany the president on his visit to the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews are able to pray. A diplomat from the US advance team told the Israelis that the wall, in East Jerusalem, was “not your territory”.

The Times

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